Video Games Are Broken, Reviews Are Broken, And Things Have To Change

"Fellow gamers, our favorite entertainment industry is in trouble. It has become the victim of irresponsible reviews and blind trust. It is being disabled by apathy and undeserved forgiveness. Something’s gotta give, and it might as well start with the press."

The author brings up some wonderful points in this article. Things need to change, or we will keep seeing broken games on release date.

[-Foxtrot]

Evolve...nuff said

I also hate when they don't factor the franchises "roots" into the review. If a game doesn't feel like what the franchise is supposed to be no matter how good the game then it should be taken into consideration. New IPs not old franchises being changed completely to stay relevant

[Godmars290]

Um, the "roots" of games haven't been a consideration since Pacman got mixed with tencho and everything not a FPS was deemed "passay". Which happened before the same was said of gamers.

[linkenski]

I think it's good enough in some cases that they account for the "everyman" experience a game has on its mainstream audience, but like you say, it's a slap in the face to any fan of a franchise when media obviously haven't played or remember the original games in a series and don't recognize the qualities their sequels lacked in comparison.

A great example would be The Elder Scrolls or Mass Effect. 75+ critics completely failed to talk about how Mass Effect 3's ending sucked hard (then went on to defend Bioware and EA for $$ when consumers complained) or that it severely skimped on some of the pillairs of the franchise being interactive dialogue, exploration, non-linear campaign. No, they were too amazed at how pretty and emotional the game was to even consider its setbacks in comparison to earlier games. I read through so many and just none of them bring up the increased autodialogue and cutscene-ness of ME3 as a negative. They didn't even seem to notice anything had changed.

The problem with media is how one-sided their narrative often is. We get their obvious agenda right in our face and they don't account for every experience a consumer may have and that IS a problem.

[rainslacker]

There's a fine line that has to be tread when writing a professional review.

Ideally, a reviewer has to review the game as it's own entity, and base their review on if it qualifies as a good game.

Some latitude is permissible to be able to rate and editorialize how fans of the series would consider the game due to content, or changes from style of prior games, but ultimately, a professional review should first and foremost look at if the game is good. The content of the review is where people can make the decision if they want it or not.

A good example in practice right now is SFV. When looking at the user reviews on metacritic, it would appear people are giving it extremely low scores due to the lack of content. Lack of content is certainly a measurable qualification for a final score, however, with many of those same low scores, they say the game play is really good or great, so the low scores only reflect people's disappointment from their expectations. Not to say those expectations are misplaced in this case, just that sometimes the expectations are all people base their score on...and we have seen that seep into a lot of professional reviews since last gen.

My biggest problem with today's professional reviews is that they are highly inconsistent. It seems no editorial process takes place to make sure that all reviews are handled in the same manner, with an actual editor making sure the writers are holding to a standard in place by the outlet in question. There seems to be absolutely no qualifications on how to grade a game based on criteria, and things which get a pass in one game, are used to drop the score, sometimes significantly, in other games.

If the people reading the review can't look at a review without questioning why it got such scores, then it's obvious that reviews are just done in a slip shod fashion which is unprofessional at best, and possibly corrupt at worst.

Then nowadays, we get the reviews which downrate and ignore a games good or bad qualities to focus on agenda driven topics which should have nothing to do with how good a game is.

Then on the flip side, we have the readers/gamers who question reviews because a reviewer fails to mention that something that is of a completely subjective nature is not mentioned or used to downrate a game. Link above uses Mass Effect as a good example. It wasn't the lack of mentioning that the ending sucked(which is subjective), it was the lack of mentioning that one's choices throughout the entire series didn't really matter in the end. Take this in contrast to Telltale Game of Thrones, where it was one of the most prevalent criticisms for the ending, and was down rated because of it.

[masterfox]

Greed in videogames is the problem of all.

[DragonDDark]

Cha-Ching! $~$

[linkenski]

It's almost already as bad as Hollywood.

Thank you capitalism. You always seem to fuck up the things we like.

[ninsigma]

Yep reviews are terribly broken. I'd rather we just did away with them. They're mostly biased drivel with no objective thinking put behind them. At the very least we should be getting rid of scoring. It actually serves no purpose only to cause fights.

[jholden3249]

There's a reason that game scored so low from users.

Cause it's virtually unplayable unless you want to play online/with friends. And when the server went down yesterday that was the final straw for me.

Your single player options are as follows:

A) train against a dummy
B) replay survival mode over and over
C) play the 3-match story mode, 5 minutes

And yet people defend this like "It's fine, only multiplayer matters" and "who plays for single player anyways" which is a bunch of garbage from people too afraid to speak ill of their precious love brand or God forbid even a third-party exclusive on that system.

Screw that. We're talking single player features that have been around in this very franchise for over 20 years. CLEARLY it matters to most people. People don't give the single player game or enough credit, and those scores from users reflect that.

[linkenski]

The best way to stop it is to shun it. I've stopped listening to journalists of gaming at large and not because of any community-generated slander or "ethics in journalism" debates but because just objectively looking at what the mainstream press is looking for in games I anticipate I've always noticed how they never care or recognize games for the same things I care about.

If it's Mass Effect they'll talk about how great the gunplay is and and they'll lightly discard any mention of issues about its RPG systems. When they're talking about The Witcher, they all fail to mention the problems of that game's 3rd act which is quite rushed and incohesive. Talk about Diablo and all they can talk about is how "addicting" it is and talk about Bethesda's open-world games all they care about is if you can ride dragons or fast-travel and talk about Bioshock Infinite and they're in awe of its concept rather than its mediocre execution of it.

I'm just done with the media of gaming. I'm just done. I still check for previews because I'll be excited for games I like, but I learned quite some time ago to take things they say with a grain of salt, especially their hyperbole scores or praise for really mundane and uninnovative games, that were conceptualized back in the 90s but simply revived and brought to mainstream audiences.

Reviews are broken, but not because of scores. It's because of the "Professional" media-makers' own perception or lack thereof or inability to objectively qualify games by any defined criteria that a consumer will be able to judge from when they make a purchase.

It is also corrupt, but not as in "EA paying us under the table". It's in how the cycle and food-chain of the industry works. Corporate publishers pay media sites to advertise their products, lend out review copies and a mutual sense of trust. If an honest reviewer gets a highly anticipated game from a major partner and then gives it 3/10 out of his objective analysis, whatever it may be, he'll probably be fired (this has happened) or the publisher will drop support of the media outlet (this has also happened) and the media outlet will be left with less to write about and less to gain clicks or revenue from. (Source, Jeff Gerstmann and Kotaku incidents)

It's a toxic cycle for the whole industry, and I agree. It has to stop, but nothing is ever simple, is it?

[rainslacker]

I agree with much of what you said, but what site has been blacklisted by a major publisher for giving a bad review? I agree there is a lot of under the table pandering, but actual blacklists or retractions of advertising? I recall one incident many years ago in a paper publication, but don't recall the details of it.

The Kotaku blacklist was because they leaked sensitive information, not due to review scores. Kotaku has given many review scores of all types, and not had a problem getting games from publishers until they decided to leak information, mostly with a biased slant and harsh criticism with no input from those that were responsible for the game. I'm not saying releasing the information they did warranted a blacklist, however, the actual leaks were highly irresponsible, and deserve some sort of recourse.

[Dark_Crow]

Find a couple sites and youtubers you like.

Games are not broken but reviews most certainly are.

Then again reviews have the challenging problem of how to differentitate small budgets versus big budgets games and expectations.

It's not easy. This is why I love totalbiscuits port reviews. They're splendidly done.

[OB1Biker]

Nowadays most reviews have become useless click baits and thats all there is to it.

[Hunkaloverbear]

Boycott metacritic and have an online protest to stop all reviews from adding numbers or else people will stop visiting those sites.

The owners of metacritic are fanboys and so are all the reviewers.

At the end of the day reviewers are just normal people with opinions that don't mean more than ours

[Goldby]

Really wanna go down this Road Hunka?

you seem alful dependant on MEta and IGN for your FACTS.

yet now you want to boycott them?

Hunkaloverbear + 2d ago
Ign rated killer instinct 84 and rated sf 80. Killer instinct also only had 6 characters at the time omg this is bad.
Ki season 2 on meta is 85
Sf on meta is 83

I'm sorry you guys were literally thinking it even comes close to ki anymore? Lol Street fighter went through its prime like 10 years ago and is now a shadow of mk and ki.

Facts are facts

[dreadz74]

This article is dead on, how could ign give SF5 a 8.0/10? You can't play the cpu story mode is 3 fights and last 5 mins lobby sucks and people can't even get online. You can't play the cpu 1 on 1 what kind of fighting game does not have a mode to play the CPU? This game clearly had paid reviews as it is a broken mess online and a bare bones experience priced @ $60 unbelievable.

[rainslacker]

The content of the review gave his reasons, and he backed up his score within that content. I don't personally feel it warranted such a high score, but some of these other sites(or users) giving it zeros or less than 5's are also not doing their reviews right.

The actual review was spot on, and didn't seem to be reflected in the score itself...which is another problem with today's review system.

I can think of numerous examples where the reviews don't reflect certain aspects of a game which fail completely to mention, or take into account it's flaws. The SFV review from IGN was not one of these examples, although I feel it was scored too high based on the review itself.